Ritratto di Raymond

Modigliani painted this small portrait in 1915, in a Paris emptied by war. Many of his friends from the Montparnasse cafés had gone to the front, and Modigliani, turned down as unfit to serve, stayed behind and kept working through the shortages. The sitter, a young man named Raymond, is built from firm, angular planes and a few decisive outlines, closer to the geometry Modigliani was taking in from Cézanne and the Cubist painters around him than to the long, dreamy necks of the nudes and portraits he is best remembered for. He gave the head that slight, thoughtful tilt he favoured, and blocked in the features with the sculptor's feel for mass he had carried over from his earlier years carving stone.